YouTube Is Purging Copyrighted Clips — Hitting the financial jackpot, it appears, may have created some headaches for YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing Web site that has agreed to be bought by Google for $1.65 billion in stock. — The site late last week began purging copyrighted material …

PayPerPost Is Now Officially Absurd — Many commenters in previous TechCrunch posts on PayPerPost compared their business model to payola in the music industry. At PayPerPost, bloggers are offered cash to write about products. Disclosure is optional, and often the bloggers are required to only express positive comments.

Brightcove aims to create video marketplace — Brightcove will release new offerings on Monday that effectively make it easier for video producers and Web sites to insert ads into their Internet videos, syndicate their content and sell clips. — Web sites select the services they want …

Marketers Demanding Better Count of the Clicks — Internet companies have had great success selling advertising space, in part because the effectiveness of those ads is supposedly so easily measured. But marketers, even as they continue to push more of their ad budgets online, are starting to ask for better proof.

SocialPoint: Best-of-Breed Wiki on Sharepoint — This morning we released SocialPoint, or Socialtext running on SharePoint. At first, this may seem counter-intuitive for a company like Socialtext. SharePoint is coming out with wikis and blogs in their 2007 version, why embrace and extend?

IPod's click wheel: Has it been framed? — PATENT FILING SHOWS NEW NAVIGATION METHOD — Bye-bye click wheel? — If a recent patent filing is any indication, Apple Computer may abandon the iconic wheel that has become virtually synonymous with its popular iPod music players.

Don't I Know You from the Internet? — Some performers are parlaying online celebrity into deals with big media. Soon they may be able to just stick to the Web — The small screen has always been a launching pad for big stars. But for some would-be famous actors, musicians, and comedians …

A Dot-Com Survivor's Long Road — When Jim Clark started Shutterfly, the online photo printing service, in December 1999, a 2-megapixel digital camera could set you back $800, investor enthusiasm for e-commerce was soaring and the words "Internet" and "bust" were rarely used in the same sentence.

Price for New Private Islands to Increase — Due to ongoing investments in developing and maintaining the underlying technology of SecondLife, Linden Lab is increasing prices for new Private Island sales. Please note that this increase does not affect tier fees for Mainland land or existing Private Islands that you currently own.

In a Blurry World, Ownership Is Yesterday's News — IT is hard to find any public policy question that feels less relevant by the minute than whether one person or company should be permitted to own television stations and newspapers in the same market. — Rules barring cross-ownership went …

MingleNow launches new bar/restaurant social networking site — MingleNow, the latest social networking company that has been in development for many months, launches a public testing version tomorrow (Monday). — MingleNow is best compared with Yelp, because it focuses on the social community around bars and restaurants.

The Persistence of (Bad) Online Data — One of the looming problems in our data-rich yet decentralized future is the difficulty of fixing bad data, once it is released onto the net. We've heard stories of Facebook profiles that turned up in embarrassing circumstances, identity theft …

Monitor110 Raises $11m More for Market Monitoring — Monitior110, the pre-launch web monitoring service for hedge fund traders we wrote about in September, will announce on Monday that it has closed a Series C round of financing with $11 million from new and existing investors.

TalkPlus, VoIP 2.0 Startup raises $5.5 million — The good news is that VoIP has moved away from its PSTN-replacement phase to a more experimental phase, where start-ups are combining presence, personality management, unified messaging and mobility and coming up with new applications.

Microsoft is banning 360 firmware modders — After several months of silence it was more or less accepted that Microsoft wasn't going to do anything about the firmware hacks that allow Xbox 360s to play backups. Rather surprising, considering the 'inventor' of the hack confirmed in March already …

Adobe Wants to Come in from the Cold — Though Adobe's Flash player sits in nearly every browser and plays hundreds of millions of videos (and other things) per day, the company doesn't charge for much of this incredible amount of usage. Now, leading up to the launch of its next platform …

Google Base, Where Are You? — I wondered why I still couldn't find Google Base listings last week. Then I got confirmation that I was not alone in wondering what happened to the promised Product Search switch from Froogle to Google Base. Brian Smith posted a comment about it on his ComparisonEngines.com blog on Thursday.